This weekend we had our first “sleep away” tournament. On Friday night we made it down to the Sideways Inn in Santa Ynez. The boys hitched a ride with their friends and when I finally arrived after work, they were all hopped-up on the excitement of roaming the halls of…
So Mohawk, Pipsqueak and Silver spent their chickhood in the artist’s studio. It was secure. It was warm. And it soon smelled, unfortunately, like a real coop. Over the spring, they graduated from a red, rinky-dink cardboard corral to a big metal horse trough. Silver was the most tame, followed…
So it always goes something like this: Jacob, James, Nate. Maybe me. This is the predictable course of every common school-age fever, sneeze, rash, or barf bug as it makes its way through our household. Jacob is our entry point. Every. Single. Time. This year we seemed to get through…
This afternoon, we made it back from Ojai in time for Nate’s All Stars soccer practice. It was a beautiful, warm afternoon and I offered to help put the goal together with one of the dads. We found ourselves staring at approximately 15 metal tubes with various colors of tape…
December. Elves working nights and weekends. Planning for 2020. And of course, workplace performance reviews. Earlier this week, I warned the boys on our drive up the mountain, “Now listen. I have to get my year-end review done tonight, so I have to work on it after dinner.” Nate, “What? Your…
All my life, Granddad has talked fondly of his mom picking him up from school. His favorite days were when she’d show-up with the bird dogs and the shotguns in her car, ready to take him hunting. Just the right mom for Granddad. Meanwhile, Nate and I have a similar…
We’re still deep into Legos and Nerf Guns. Thankfully, Pokémon is finally losing its grip on our wallets. Now beyond these mainstays, every few years the No It All Gift Guide for Boys likes to mix it up. You know, we gotta keep it woke. We started with the OG…
When my childhood friend, Nealy, got married, her older sister Erin gave the best speech– almost perfectly summarizing the experience of growing-up in the Santa Cruz mountains. It talked about her parents raising tough mountain women that knew how to stack wood, dig ditches, and weather the inevitable disasters brought-on…
As I’ve mentioned, Jacob is very interested in entrepreneurship and business and how you make money. Lately he has a lot of questions about taxes and interest. The former involving how he avoids them, and the latter involving how he can apply it to his little brother. So today Jake decides…
Last weekend we had our second annual Halloween party. No joke, ever since his inaugural party, Jacob’s been planning the next one. We’ve created a monster! He tells me he loves planning parties. He loves setting-up the upstairs as a Nerf gun zombie apocalypse course. He loves filling the giant horse trough for…